the dick desert
having dreams
A few nights ago, around 2am, I was sitting on the floor at a party. The party was bumping. There were two separate fights with people in line for the bathroom, and half of the guests in attendance were dancing, and the other half were talking. The music was very loud. It was ideal. I was drinking water. I don’t especially like drinking with people I don’t know. At some point, a gay guy who I hadn’t seen or spoken to all night, sat down next to me and said to me very seriously, unprompted, “We are in a DICK DESERT.”
I agreed.
I asked him if I should make an effort to see someone I had connected with on a dating app over the weekend.
“Did he text you on Thursday?” He asked.
No, I said.
“I’m going to tell you this, because I know your BEST FRIEND would tell you this, but if he didn’t text you on THURSDAY then he’s NOT worth it.”
He paused.
“Men have only ever disappointed me.” He said.
I get it, I said.
It’s Monday morning, and I drank martinis with Emma and Will last night and ate chicken piccata and Caesar salad at Bernie’s, which was really good. We were celebrating finishing a bunch of music. Today, my eyelids feel puffed and droopy and I feel happy, even though I have a lurking underlying feeling of stress about leaving New York on Friday, which I am NOT happy about, but it is what it is. At least it’s warm in Texas.
Like everyone, I read Lena Dunham’s new book last week, and was mostly amazed by her ownership of her own desire, her own hunger for seemingly everything — men, money, attention, success, sex. She contained so much wanting — seemingly able to hold so many contradictory needs without shaming herself out of pursuing them. How often, I wonder, do I prevent myself from going after the things I want or desire, simply because I think I’m not allowed to have them. Obviously, my latest song hands on the wheel, is about wanting. After the fire, for close to two years, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted, I was so spiritually divorced from myself that I couldn’t identify my desires or wants in a more macro sense — dreaming felt inaccessible.
When I was 21, I walked the Camino de Santiago and had a brief fling with an Italian guy who was about ten years older than me, and grieving the loss of his girlfriend who had died in childbirth. The magnitude of that loss was beyond my comprehension at the time. It still is. Mostly, we just made out in the woods and got drunk, but one time I remember I asked him what he liked about me, and he said, “You have dreams.”
I never forgot that, because I did not understand it. I was so young, it had never occurred to me that it was possible to be without dreams, without ideas for the future. I am thinking about this, because this morning I had to step out of the coffeeshop to talk to Claire on the phone, and mid-conversation she was asking me about my dreams, and I suddenly realized I was able to articulate them. Having dreams is a kind of privilege. Suddenly, standing on the sidewalk, I felt very lucky.
Someone else at the party told me that “genes are always trying to reproduce themselves, and so if you think of the iPhone like a gene, then it has successfully repopulated the world several times over. There are more iPhones than there are people.” Someone else, who told me that he’d taught classes on AI or something, told me that a lot of people are beginning to think AI is “actually our first encounter with alien intelligence.” He was disturbed. “What do you think is going to happen?” He asked me. “I don’t know, that’s very spooky,” I said. Maybe we’re coming to the end of all things known, but people kept doing what people do and climbing out of the window to smoke, and dancing and drinking, and everyone kept talking to me and touching me. I felt very human.
By then, it had gotten so late, that I took a car home instead of the train. Being in the back of an uber always puts me deeply in touch with my own melodrama, totally awake to my own lived experience, as if I’m touching the literal membrane of life itself. You know what I mean. I’ve had the feeling in the days since, that I am hurling myself into life. This probably has something to do with what I wrote about last week, this feeling like there is no time to waste — the willingness to ask and ask and ask, and talk and email and text, and work and try, shoot the shot, go to the party after the party, absorb as much as is available, eat banana ice cream, sleep in when time allows, even if we’re in a dick desert, even if it’s aliens, even if the answer is no.