June 6, 2015, Part III.

Katherine Bernard writes and makes videos. Here is her website.

6:30 am, my bed

Rain pouring outside, relief. Re-wrap and go back to sleep.

8:19 am, my bed

I think a bird woke me up.

Check texts.

From M.:

Would prefer if you just got married and locked it down immediately

Check Instagram:

@carven_paris posts three photos with the same caption:

Marvelous marble on the set of the #Carven #Resort16 lookbook

I feel anxious. I make a pillow box around my head and go back to sleep.

Noon, Northeast Kingdom, eating eggs

with my friend S. who shares his philosophy for writing fiction:

Crucify them with sadness then tickle them on the cross.

S. pays for brunch.

12:53, Standing in Bushwick open studios in front of a work called The Butterfly Scales by Hartmut Stockter. It’s actually a scale for weighing a butterfly. There’s a test tube filled with water with a flower in it on one end and a scale on the other, like a traditional balance. You center it at 0 once the flower is in place, and when the butterfly lands you read how much it weighs.

Think about the tracks i and u on the front and back ends of Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly, the balance of “i” self-love:

I love myself

and “u” self-flagellation [Kendrick’s subconscious addressing himself]:

Loving you is complicated

12:57 pm Bushwick open studio, overhearing

Is it more like an exploration of you or an exploration of your idea?

3:10 pm, my room

changing my sheets. Every time I do this I think of Kathleen Edwards’ song Change the Sheets.

Now I’m thinking about someone who asked me never to write about them fuckfuckfuck.

I think of something even stupider to do: trim the hole-punched ends off four pages from an old book of marble samples and tape the neatened pages above my bed. Come one come all and sleep beneath my shrine to cold metamorphic rock.

The marble is called (and labeled) Madre Veined Alabama, and I think of a mother wearing shorts that show her blood vessel’ed legs at a state fair in Alabama.

3:40 pm, my desk

writing a script that’s due tomorrow.

i: this is good

u: everyone hates everything you do; die.

Check texts.

None.

6:34 pm, my desk

I text J a picture of my new arrangement over my bed.

She replies:

O v cool

U n marble r #same

6:51 pm, my desk

I get a call from my friend D. On Twitter she’s made multiple beautiful declarations about 1. not-answering the phone and 2. canceling plans. We correspond several times a day, via e-mail, text, twitter, and sometimes I think something else, but this might be the first phone call in the history of our friendship. She’s CALLING because she wants to MAKE plans. It’s a monumental day.

8:26 pm Walter Foods, Having oysters with my friend J.

and we’re looking around to see if there’s an extra chair to pull up when our friend A. arrives. There is. He arrives and tells us he’s just finished a book called Hear, All Ye People; Harken, O Earth about a test for font trustworthiness that ran in the NYT. Readers selected whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “We live in an era of unprecedented safety,” but not everyone saw the statement in the same font. The study determined that Baskerville was the most trustworthy font. Baskerville isn’t available here on Google Drive so I’ll just have to learn to trust myself.

9:40 pm, Walking in Williamsburg

my friend J. points to a garbage and mud globule on the sidewalk and says “That’s you.”

u.

9:53 pm, Donna, drinking and

coming up with a Plan for my friend M.’s birthday party next weekend. M. just moved into an apartment with J. above a bar that has a back garden. J. tells me that when you go onto the roof of their building, you can peer down and watch everyone in the bar’s garden. I say we should set up a cake and people and balloons in the garden, then lure M. onto her roof. When she looks down she will see an aerial view of her surprise party.

Don’t worry, M. won’t read this.

10:20 pm, Donna, drinking

and J. but mostly A.’s friend N. arrives. The last time J. saw N. he had a carnation soaked in poppers in his lapel.

10:30 pm, Donna, asking

N. if I can take a transcript of HIS day, because all I’ve done is change my sheets and cry and I didn’t even tell you about the crying.

N. agrees. Here is N’s day: “…we took a lot of MDMA at le bain. Getting there it was downpouring. We danced it off. We met a couple that were French and Trinidadian. So it was two Italians. An American. A Kuwaiti. A Frenchman. A Trinidadian. It’s 7 am. I suggest we go to the UN Ambassador’s Grill. It’s one of the sexiest places- everything is green marble and mirrors. Various diplomats having their breakfast. They don’t serve alcohol. I had a flask full of tequila and we made Tequila Sunrises. We were paying Rhapsody in Blue on our phones. I had half a grapefruit and a side of bacon. Couple invites us to their apartment in Bushwick. I take an Ambien there and go to sleep. I wake up three hours later. They set up a mezcal tasting with cocaine. It’s 3 pm. We watch soccer. The couple continues on to a party, and I went home, put on an ice mask, drank a full bottle of rose and watched Wolf of Wall Street. Then I took a cold shower and came here.

At the bar I look up some names for green marble to see if they are sexy and (imagine this is in Baskerville) they are sexy: