Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes

3

DEATH RUINED THE RETURN.

According to Wikipedia, the last member of any species is called an endling. The entry names five individuals who occupied this final slot in their respective evolutionary chains: Martha (Passenger Pigeon), Incas (Carolina parakeet), Booming Ben (Heath hen), Benjamin (Tasmanian tiger), Celia (Pyrenean ibex), Lonesome George (Pinta Island tortoise). Recently, I’ve started to say their names to myself before I go to bed, chanting and rechanting them like a nursery rhyme: Martha Incas / Booming Ben / Lone-some George / Cel-i-a and Ben-ja-min.

ENDLINGS RUINED DEATH.

Tim writes to me to say that an endling triumphs over extinction because it is literally the death of the death of its species. When they disappear or are stuffed and mounted in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., they take with them the demise of everyone who might have survived them. I love these endlings and hope that love, within its power, can restore them to life. Or it is love, I think, that allows the future to finally emerge out of linear time in order to bring us back to the starting point. Or love is an engine that reroutes the disappeared and returns them to their rightful place in the hierarchy of things we’ve lost but which will soon reappear in the present more alive than they were before. Or.

Repeat yourself a few times, say goodbye, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Tumblr, take a shower, read the news, play “Love Me,” say goodbye, love me.

Repeat yourself a few times, read Dennis Cooper, text a friend, go home, say goodbye, drink coffee, buy a chair, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Tumblr, say goodbye, go to bed, wake up in the middle of the night, say goodbye, listen to Selena Gomez, look at Wikipedia, read the endlings, say goodbye, love me.

SELENA GOMEZ RUINED LIL WAYNE.

Selena Gomez’s “Naturally” is a counterpoint to Lil Wayne’s “Love Me” in its radical affirmation of the other as an animating agent within the self and suggests a status update in terms of the relationship between her and the subject of love. I stand on the roof of my apartment on Park Place and Nostrand Avenue, looking at Crown Heights in early spring, waiting for the rain promised by my weather app, listening to her unravel the logic of pure, scattering desire as she channels the voice of another, a voice which she internalizes to express in her own stunning hit the maximizing effect of listening to someone you love speak, a lover we do not hear, but who invigorates us, too. “How you choose to express yourself, it’s all your own, I can tell it comes naturally.” The act of speaking as one would “naturally” speak takes her breath away, supernaturalizing her romance into the compatible forces of thunder and lightning. She is nature. Pink sheets, fluttering skies, summer noon, drawn shades, lava lamp, flaming jet, purple light, server crash, shadowed face, smudged dark, my home, your islands, Martha, Incas, sure thing, August palette, hands held, lips, lipgloss, Benjamin, new job, smoking weed, Lonesome George, as it was, Booming Ben, yes of course, Crown Heights, Celia, flash drive, sleep well, cab ride, good night, forever forever, forever certain, it comes naturally.

all day I dream about

my Adidas tracksuit

*

I wrote this fragment in my notebook a few weeks after I had fallen in love with the tracksuit. My obsession began when a friend wore an Adidas jacket and black pants one night to drinks at a bar. In the dark, I misread his outfit as a full tracksuit — a surprise choice for what I had (wrongly) thought of as a date. Later, when I told him that I thought he looked good in athletic wear, he said he wasn’t wearing a full tracksuit, just the jacket. Still, I really thought he looked hot in his imaginary tracksuit and after that night I often fantasized about boys wearing the semi-form-fitting synthetic fabric — in bedrooms and soccer fields, subways and dive bars. The tracksuit defines enough of the body to describe its shape but not enough to reveal the higher definition of its contours. The tracksuit, like the plastic it’s made from, works for different people in different ways, and this difference diversifies its social use. The tracksuit evokes the English, English skinheads but also the London riots of 2011, when thousands of impoverished Londoners exploited by shitty economics and ignored by the stewards of that decaying system took to the streets to smash windows, overturn cars, and set houses on fire. In the YouTube videos of these riots, many of the men are wearing tracksuits. The tracksuit evokes soccer players at the World Cup. It evokes NYU students who are too lazy to wear normal clothing when they walk down University Place to their ugly library on Washington Square South. Russian men can be seen wearing them while they beat up gay rights activists, who themselves are wearing tracksuits. The tracksuit is ageless and fits anyone for any moment. In this regard, the tracksuit is an image for an emancipatory politics that might emerge from the ecological wreckage of our moment as a flexible, evasive, even nonspecific opposition to the current economic configuration of “the world.” One size, more or less, fits all. Also, not. It’s a certain gay look I currently like. My friend really did look hot when I thought he was wearing a tracksuit. The tracksuit is versatile: its synthetic fabric is optimized for comfort and durability, meaning it can withstand varying weather conditions and climates. Wearing my own Adidas tracksuit and jogging through Central Park in the fall, beneath the changing leaves, I think about the autumnal blur canopied over me that I never really stop to parse. Leaves change via a complicated process I look up and can say happens because of the presence of chlorophyll in the leaves, a pigment held in an organelle called a chloroplast. When chlorophyll is abundant in the leaf’s cells, as it is during the growing season, its green color dominates and masks the colors of any other pigments that may be present. As daylight decreases and the days and nights cool, the veins that carry fluids into and out of the leaf are gradually closed off as a layer of special cork cells forms at the stem. As this cork layer develops, water and mineral intake into the leaf is reduced, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. It is during this time that the chlorophyll begins to decrease and the color begins to change. The leaf slowly lowers its green mask. I circle Central Park as the light shifts back and the evening takes on the sharp, clear air that carries the city light toward me, swamping the trees with the bright, urban night. I finish my run and stop at the edge of the park, near 59 thStreet and Broadway. A man selling pretzels and wearing a tracksuit looks at me and shouts, “You need water?”

1. PVG to SFO, Shanghaied to Old Gold Mountain; youtube tutorial, how to dye your faded bluejean sunsets to black (3 sages grimace/smile at the industrial dust cloud banding across the Pacific, radioactive isotopes of the visual-virtual’s uncontrollable fission). Amazing that Americans can obtain so much mass, approximate stuff of two or three people in Beijing. Meanwhile political prisoners have been harvested for organs, transhipment via former soviet republics into wealthy diabetics and career alcoholics: because nickelodeon’s green goo is people, appropriated lyrics of mourning (napalm girl, coal miner’s daughter).

2. The fortune-cookie reads: “—Never mistake a killer for a koan.” Language lesson on the back: “Sociopathic: without any empathy. SEE: Henry Miller as a boy, deliberately farting at the funerary casket of another child, to express his contempt for both friendship and sorrow; SEE ALSO, Marquis de Sade, violently abusing a prostitute. Note: Critics tend to confuse sociopathy with a purported,”—absolute freedom of artistic/spiritual vision,” because they themselves fear empathy as the taint of influence and/or restricted, unreflective thinking. Above all else, the critic desires to appear sophisticated, savvy, and in on the joke. The pure sociopath desires to tell a joke that ends in the death of the entire world external to himself/herself. Lucky lottery numbers: “Un Coup de Dés / enfants ont cassé les carreaux.” ((Justine Redwood Bieber exclaims as (s/he) falls: “—for nowadays the world is lit by lightning. Blow out your candles, California, and so say goodbye… ”))