Jun 19 23

I woke up immeasurably depressed and went back to sleep and was basically catatonic all day. I went to this meeting and it was terrible and made me want to stop being sober. I went to my friend’s house nearby, because I thought he was having an opening and wanted to see him, but I got the days wrong and he was out of town. I called my dad but he didn’t answer.

I want some sort of spiritual rescue. I want God to touch his finger on me and pull out the parts of my brain everyone can agree are bad and which I can smell putrefying up there. Unfortunately somewhere along the way we killed the hand of God and all that is left are his designs.

I moped around back at home for a while until it was time for a literary event in the Oculus building which replaced the Twin Towers. I loved going into the Oculus- it’s an incredibly strange building, immediately dated in its futurism. There was video art adorning the walls by an artist I know to have made fascinating, complex demonstrations of a kind of skeptical technological optimism in the past. These videos were AI generated, slowly morphing scenes of intentional striking ugliness. Humorous ironic imagery, freak pathologies, failures of built environments.

There was a raffle and Genevieve and I went up to accept the award. It was a date with a sort of influencer figure neither of us had heard of. We both felt humiliated and confused – I thought that my girlfriend had put her hat in the ring to raffle for a date for reasons I couldn’t fathom, but which clearly reflected badly on me, but she explained that she didn’t want a date with this unknown figure, and something odd had gotten mixed up either out of an unhappy accident or for nefarious purposes of public humiliation. We never figured out what happened, but felt embarrassed by the strange confusion. Maybe we were being punished for our sin of gambling. We went to the afterparty feeling bullied. I sort of wanted to die at that point and I felt stupid in my sadness.

My friend confided in me that he couldn’t stop thinking about how horrible he was and how much he wanted to kill himself. I told him that I got rid of that internal loop after getting sober, but now have to read existentialism in order to figure out what I actually want. I meant this as an ironic aside, but a French woman coming out from her building approached us and reprimanded me, saying, ‘Existentialism, Nihilism! You must fight that, I tell my children this, but they don’t listen.’ She said some other stuff that I couldn’t parse due to her bare understanding of English but I’m sure whatever she said was correct. She asked for help walking to the corner and I took her there and then went home. I woke up at 3pm the next day.

Mar 25 24

I was going through a phase where I didn’t care about the diary at all and felt no pressure to do anything about it when, this morning, I experienced probably the most serious consequence from the whole project. A director who I’ve worked for twice, and who I was going to work for tomorrow texted me this morning furious and hurt because of what I had written about her. Fair enough.

I got these texts:

Hey Arthur

I was showing the producer your website and came across your “diary entry”

I’m quite shocked at what you published about me online when I’ve brought you on set

Then she sent me a conversation she had with a rapper we had worked with on a video where he referred to me as a “retarded school shooter”. I think that's made me self conscious of the repetitive and solipsistic nature of the entries, which reflects on the repetitive and solipsistic material of my inner thoughts. It’s good to get feedback, and I certainly think there's something to this. I’m already wary of being too negative- I know that the diary form can come across whiny if one isn’t careful. Reading my diaries from high school is a ghastly experience- each comes across like a separate suicide note.

Here are the texts I tried to send but couldn’t due to being blocked:

am I still blocked?

I mean I understand where youre coming from it was definitely not a nice thing I said

thats sort of part of the experiment and yeah maybe I am a real retard etc and definitely am embarrassing

but I dont think I can remedy the situation too much other than saying you are totally right to not like me and we can just go our seperate ways and I am sorry

I didnt remember saying any of that thats sort of the point of being frustrated and writing things down and then exposing yourself etc

good luck on your shoot I'm sure this didnt put you in a great mood

so Im definitely sorry about that

May 29 24

Staying at Anna’s mother’s house in Budapest. We went down towards the Danube in a streetcar because we wanted to usethe Sulphuric baths, which is a common activity for the residents of Budapest.

Before entering the Gellért Sauna we found ourselves in front of this church embedded into a cave next door. The cave-church was originally created by a hermit out of the same sulphuric muddy springs (the sáros fürdő) which feed the sauna baths.

A part of me continues to feel dispossessed of the world when I see that we can no longer look at it in the way the hermit did. Going into the saunas I had no belief that there was a particularly non-symbolic medical value to the mineral water. I enjoyed the sensual aspects of it- the heat and the heavy water and even the deep low sulphuric odor, but I couldn’t suspend my disbelief in anything from nature having medicinal properties enough to buy Anna’s insistence that it cured her acne in past visits. The hermit who built the church, however, took the notion that the water had healing properties enough to use it to dispense mercy directly from God to the sick, and created the cave complex to worship this grace.

This brings about a feeling I’ve gotten a lot during my ambling about Europe, as well during my life in general. It’s nostalgia for a sense of bewilderment and mystery which the hermit must have had to decide the cave was fit for a Godly church. It's hard for me to imagine ever being as sincere about anything as the hermit was for his church. I had a similar feeling in the Basilica of St Stephen’s, where a saintly mummified hand still sits. I wish I could have given the reliquary its emotional due, but in modern times a preserved hand feels kitsch rather than sacramental.

Feb 23 24

I have been thinking about shooting cocaine the last day or two. When I’m having IV cravings for some reason it’s usually cocaine, even though I was more into shooting speedballs or just h/fent. I think the amount and frequency of cocaine I would inject during certain phases of my addiction and the fact that it’s so much dopamine being released at once has just indelibly imprinted on my brain. It’s a sensation so intense that it’s psychedelic, and isn’t that comparable to any other sensation I have ever felt. It’s just multiplying your excitement by several orders of magnitude but in no particular direction. It’s basically so good that it’s insane I don’t still do it. Sad to know that I will never ever feel that good again no matter what, but that’s the cost of being a drug addict in recovery. Trying to turn it over to God. I feel feeble and human and need a great power to hold my hand through the world. I’m working a wedding right now (hiding in the closet) and they have a southern protestant pastor. I think the groom is gay. I’ve been praying a lot today. I’m realizing how much fear I’m living in. I think I already said that. I want the fear to dissipate. I don’t just want to be brave but I want to feel unfettered by it. God have mercy on me, a sinner. Your way is the way of eternal life. Amen.

Jun 20 24

Couldn’t sleep well last night, partly bc I was still transcoding video, and partly because Genevieve was (is) mad at me about the diary. She said she was mad because I portrayed her as a vaguely inconvenient antagonist side character. The proximate breaking point seems to have been the post where I complained about how drunk she and her friends got at the crab place in Redhook, and how sorry I felt for myself as an alcoholic or whatever, but truly and more fundamentally she had much more issue with how she was represented (or rather, not represented) during our trip to Europe. It’s a fair concern. She’s very understanding of my stupid online diary, and I’m grateful she didn’t say what she could have said, which was that I was only in Europe because she wanted to bring me along, and I had gone along and written a bunch of ungrateful diary posts about how I was sad or about how nice various churches were or whatever it was I actually said without ever thanking her once.

What she did say was that it was important to her that we did the trip together, and the scant mention of her (and only in neutral contexts) made her feel bad⁶. I can understand why she feels that way- it’s like I cut her out of my experience of our shared adventure, and took it all for myself in the retelling. First things first: mea culpa. I agree with her. She spelled out the evidence⁷ clearly for me. She has demonstrated to me that someone reading my diary would get an unfortunate version of my lover and best friend.

I can’t do that much to rectify this problem, except for trying to do better in the future. One thing I could do now would be to go on a long tirade about how wonderful and perfect my sweet beautiful Genevieve is. That is true and it would be a good thing for me to do that, but it sort of doesn’t count if I’m just trying to get out of trouble⁸.

I want to work through the problem as it is, because Genevieve’s objection to my lack of positive acclaim is in part that she is hurt that a potential reader might get the sense that she’s a nagging bitch or something, but in stronger terms she described her frustration with the disconnect between my words and actions in real life and what I write in the diary.

One aspect of this is just I mostly complain in the diary. Most of my thoughts are negative and critical, and I don’t always think the positive ones are very interesting. I also consider a diary to be a method of working through little sticky annoyances and things that bother me, so a lot of the time I’m just spouting off various grievances that have irritated me in a day. If things are going well with Genevieve, which they are almost always, it doesn’t become something I want to excise by way of writing it down. My relationship with Genevieve is one of the few really good things in my life, and I’m happy that I don’t spend a lot of thought and effort working through problems.

I also know that I have never thought my way into getting anything. I’ve only thought my way out of things. If I have something I like, I try desperately to not think about it, as that would only ruin it. I fear I would either, through my various subconscious or conscious ill-advised machinations and schemes, actually deprive myself of my object of happiness, or else through my deeply honed sense of ambivalence ruin my appreciation, subdue my reverence, and phenomenologically taint whatever good thing I have with a gordian knot of cerebration, thus driving it away from my grasp psychically. This is a fear-based reaction I should work against actively.

I’m also probably not good at talking about being in love. It’s pretty corny to be in love, and it’s also very hard to express anything that amounts to the immense sublimity that the phenomena of love feels like. I really really love Genevieve, and I like having people bear witness to it, but it seems like the observation of the two of us together expresses the particular depth and perfection of our love better than I am likely to say on my amateur autofiction substack. That nonetheless doesn’t mean I am not responsible for trying.

The thing that really surprised me about Genevieve taking me to task for being a bad literary boyfriend was that she said I had all these cerebral words to say about the Danube, but wrote about it as though I were there all alone. This surprised me because in my mind, one of the really important things about going to the Danube was going there with Genevieve. It felt like the ideal place to be two people in love. I remember walking along with her and feeling like we were doing the absolute perfect thing together. I’m sure I would have liked walking the Danube alone, but I have serious doubts it would have made anywhere close to the impression it made on me with Genevieve on my arm, and I suspect the emotional flavor would have been melancholic, rather than blissful.

I thought I had written something to that effect, if even as a passing reference. Maybe I did and I can’t find it, but I certainly didn’t write anything at length about it, which makes me feel ugly. Genevieve said that I was in fact likely not being honest if I wasn’t expressing my love for her, or at least describing any positive attributes of her. This is interesting to me, because I would have thought I would know if I was being dishonest. Time and time again I rediscover doing the diary that there are many more ways of being dishonest than being honest, and it is very hard to tell which one you are doing until after the fact.

So indeed I have been dishonest. I think I have internalized a sense that my emotions are bad and shouldn’t be mentioned. It’s not unique or interesting and it is an embarrassing pathology primarily affecting men. I think I have a particularly acute case for a couple reasons.

• My WASPy nuclear family is impressively emotionally reserved.
• Early in my life I had problems with explosive anger, and have learned to dissipate all emotions before they get the better of me.
• I spent a lot of time in treatment during my adolescence, and felt like it was a place where emotions good or bad were effectively punished, and the only safe way to feel at all times was bemused and detached.
• Emotions are embarrassing, incorrect, and are for girls.

I would like to do better in the future on this front. Not only would I like to write about my affection and esteem for Genevieve, but I think both myself and my writing would drastically improve by increasing the emotional input and honesty.

⁶ She specified that the negative emotion she felt was pissed off.
⁷ She pulled up the diary and did a name search. There were 109 mentions of ‘Genevieve’ — the vast majority were perfunctory, like Genevieve and I went to xyz and did blah blah blah, and a few were more or less positive, but these were outweighed by me complaining about stuff she did or otherwise painting her in not the best light.
⁸ I’m not actually in trouble- the only thing that Genevieve did by way of retaliation is text me to ask if ‘I still hate her’ a couple times which is funny and sort of sweet in a way.