In 1995, when I was 25, I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and began the practice of “morning pages,” i.e., writing stream-of-consciousness style for 20 minutes per day. This habit continued for the next three decades.     In 2020, in an effort to cut down on the hundreds of pounds of old notebooks I’d been storing, I began to transcribe them using voice-to-text. Once I had all the early journals transcribed, I took pictures of various pages, ripped out a few other pages to keep, and tossed the rest. (Please note that the word “tossed” here means “ripped up, then went around to at least 15 different garbage cans in various neighborhoods in Manhattan to dispose of the torn scraps, so that nobody would be able to find a whole trove and piece them together somehow.”) Now I’ve started posting excerpts from the transcripts of my old diaries. But WHY. WHY AM I DOING THIS. These diary entries are not flattering to me....

(Unpublished, 2022) Last night, I spent five and a half hours watching blackhead extraction videos on YouTube. It does not feel good to admit this, but it felt excellent to do it. I’ve become a craven being. Last month, to thwart myself, I adjusted the settings on my phone so I could only watch 90 minutes of YouTube per day. Now I watch 90 minutes of YouTube per day on my phone, and hours more on my laptop. The first step to solving my problem is to acknowledge it, which is why I’ve put off this reckoning so assiduously. I don’t want to quit watching blackhead extractions. Furthermore, I’ve been ashamed to own up to what I’ve been doing, and I think that’s appropriate. I’m proud to be ashamed. If I’m going to be a disgrace, at least I can loathe myself for it. In order to understand, and thereby to overcome, my maladaptive behavior,[1] I propose to analyze its complex aspects through the lenses of various modalities. Defining the subject of inquiry: Blackhead extraction videos are videos...

I was The Only One You Could Really Talk To. You’re not supposed to be happy to have cancer. You treated it like a triumph. You’d been complaining about your health for years, and sympathy was wearing thin. Co-workers had started rolling their eyes at your excuses. Then you were diagnosed with liver cancer. All those people were wrong to suspect you of exaggerating; they owed you fervent apologies. You were vindicated. The day of your diagnosis, you posted: “Tests came back. Cancer. Shit just got real.” Shit just got real. What a strange phrase for the circumstances. Like a line from a bad action movie; like a challenge, but to whom? It stuck in my head, Shit just got real. Shit wasn’t real before? Your friends threw you a party. Even better: it was a benefit. A party where people came to support you, tell you how important you were, tell you how bereft they’d be without you, and give you money for your expenses. You’d raised a few thousand dollars online, but it wasn’t going to be enough....

I spent most of the toga party in the girls’ bathroom. I kept going in and out to do coke with Nicola, then getting caught up in conversations; after a while it made more sense just to stay. Plus it was a prime observation post: I stood on the lid of the leftmost toilet and watched everything from above like a security camera, omniscient. For some reason, this party was even more debauched and louche than our usual high school parties. Maybe it was because it was in a rented dance studio instead of someone’s house, or because we were all wearing bedsheets, or maybe there was a sale on drugs, but everyone got very fucked up very quickly. I personally was on acid and coke, on top of smoking joints and drinking. I hadn’t planned it that way, it was a fluke of opportunity, but since it happened, I made sure to tell everyone I saw about this bonkers combo platter of drugs I was on, in case anyone had forgotten how hardcore I was. At sixteen and three-fourths, I had so many sexual partners that...

Kumbaya, Motherfucker is a series of social media posts written from January to May of 2017. During this time, I was walking around New York City with the sign pictured above, aggressively singing “Kumbaya” at people who disagreed. Here are the posts in chronological order: Kumbaya, Motherfucker Kumbaya, Class Consciousness Kumbaya, Baby Kumbaya, Briefly Kumbaya, Bitches Kumbaya, Kids Kumbaya, Concerned Friends Kumbaya, King Kumbaya, Springtime Kumbaya, Stoners Kumbaya, Rational People Kumbaya, Brooklyn Kumbaya, George Kumbaya, Kind of a Monotonous Song After a While Kumbaya, Comerades Kumbaya, Dude. Whatever. Kumbaya, For Fuck’s Sake Kumbayeah, Maybe It’s Time to Stop Kumbaya, I’m Still Singing Oh, Lord. Kumbaya.      

(Originally published in Lumina, 2013) It wasn’t even a metaphor. That was the name of the place: the Utopia Diner, on Amsterdam and 73rd. But it was the closest diner to the Meadow, where everyone from all the schools went to hang out, so if its name had taken on a double meaning among me and my friends, it’s because that’s usually where we were when the acid peaked. We spent so much time at the Utopia. It was like clocking in at our jobs. The waiters, gruff men with hairy hands, pot bellies, and purple pouches under the eyes; unsmiling waitresses who spoke in monotone – Uh huh, you want that with salad, we have thousand island… They knew us and we knew them. They knew we were on drugs and we knew they knew. They looked over our heads at the counter waiting for us to decide. They said, I come back when you ready. I took acid every chance I got that summer. It was the only thing that made sense to me, the only way to render myself defenseless enough to admit what I pretended not to know....

(Originally published in Nerve.com, 2008) I was a comic, and so was he. He was one of those Kaufmanesque types; more of a performance artist, really; someone who’d come out in a blond wig and dance spastically until the audience laughed from the sheer awkwardness of it. Whereas I was more of a set-up/punch gal, with bits and jokes and routines: the phone sex bit, the abortion joke, the younger men routine. I “worked blue,” as they say; I was bawdy, and talked a lot about sex, mostly about how I wasn’t having it. I was recently single again, after a failed five-year relationship, and I was trying to drown my sorrows in anonymous applause. I didn’t like him. I didn’t hate him, the way I hated some other comics, with their racist, homophobic bullshit, but I didn’t particularly like him. A few of my female friends had made out with him – he had a reputation as something of a slut, a reputation he cultivated at every opportunity – and I thought he was a little handsy, a little bratty, a little...