Hey hey hey I’m the president

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Says Desmond, waving his Capri Sun, “I’m the 

president.” In the car, “Iris,” by the Goo Goo Dolls comes on and I actually

get shivers. What is happening? “Everything seems like a movie,

yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive.” It’s clearly about

the Spectacle. What is happening, I continue to think, as I wait for

the green left turn arrow, my reality augmented with this song and 

sudden understanding of a recent TikTok trend, a rampantly nostalgic

one. My sanity is not boozy enough, and there’s no reset button

for sanity. I have been working all day in the demeaning, empowering

way that a job is a job and inhumanity is inhumanity. The inanity 

of tasks, some tasks at least. I bought a bouquet of flowers for Coco’s

birthday but they won’t last. My apathy won’t last. Desmond sings along

to the soundtrack to Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse and dances.

Hey now, friend. Now I’m staring at an empty glass. Now I’m wondering

about the apocalypse and the rocket NASA just sent around the moon.

How much skepticism is allowed? Pondering my lack of options, I pour

a beer, admit I’m uptight, think of lost loves as a way of remembering

that I am a complex person. I have loved a circus performer and many

poets. The twigs hereof are physic. The lies hereof are physic, too, and

worsen with time and space, but my love for the circus performer was

not a lie. None of my loves have been lies, though some of them have

been stupid, possibly ridiculous, and caused not by the relationship 

between two subjects but instead by the thrall between two love objects.

I begin to see my errors. The excessive garlic, the one drink too many.

Coco screams because she can’t make the CD play pay her favorite 

K Pop Demon Hunters song. I’d like a nice Bordeaux and some cheese.

Too much meatloaf has ruined the evening. I’m not a behaviorist but

I get the appeal of pattern and repetition. If life is no more than a series

of gestures, a broken series of skin-of-the-teeth, mostly successful

signals, if it is, then I talked enthusiastically about data sets with 

someone who was relieved that I could put one together. “I’m the

President!” Insists Desmond. I don’t want the world to see me, I think,

I want to rewatch The X-Files while exercising on the elliptical trainer.

Now there’s coffee and the morning, the prayer book and portrait of 

my great, great grandmother I found in the box while cleaning out my

studio. Trevor asks if this poem is giving me trouble and it is. Coco

and Desmond curled into our bed last night and I imagine we are in

a fox den together. The Department of Homeland Security is still shut

down and I hate the DHS but like someone I know who works there

and wonder to what extent a philosopher would find me ethically

complicit in all the harms perpetuated by my country, if philosophers

even think about that. Lettuce and radishes are sprouting, just not 

where the squirrels keep digging. The questions come, like always.

Who was I in the nineties? Often a girl with a boyfriend and many 

confusing friendships. Sometimes I was in China. That’s not the nostalgia

of the TikTok trend. Sometimes I was on the back of my friend’s 

bicycle with my arms around her waist, riding over the Pearl River 

in Guangzhou, or running through construction sites. Nostalgia

gets a little more interesting when subjected to reality.