Fake Stakes
notes from my nemesis
She told me, “I’m thinking about absolute evil and absolute good, how they don’t exist. All that matters is our actions. If a person does evil things they will be judged by the things they do, like everyone else, unless we choose to look away.”
At pizza she mentioned that she has been “taking a break from weed” as a justification for the vivid dreams she’s been having about sexual tension between her and everyone she encounters.
To the table she confessed that she’s had a dream in which she was part of “some kind of scary evacuation. It was crowded, run by a lawless government agency. They were menacingly throwing opened ‘fun size’ Halloween candy to each person as they were funneled through a checkpoint. A few people ahead got mini Reeces Peanut Butter Cups, my fave. As they threw candy to me it fell to the ground. It was a Three Musketeers or Snickers, so I didn’t want it, but picked it up anyway. We were on the campus of Berkeley. People were getting out stacks of books from the library with the urgency of a riot. It was an atmosphere of sad resignation.”
She advised, “With an attention span as short as yours, if you really want to get anything accomplished, you must create fake stakes, but convince yourself they’re real.”
She probed, “What does it mean to quote latin or write in Latin now?
It means you’re trying to:
a.) Dogwhistle: speak in a way that only certain people will respond to, then feel on the inside of a line delineated by your language, like a member of an elite club.
b.)Signal how educated you are, since many do not understand Latin.”
I overheard her telling our mutual friend that she’d gone to see The Nutcracker at Christmastime where a person was screaming. The first NOOOOOO! came right at the moment in the performance when the toy nutcracker was introduced, which was funny, timing-wise, and landed well with the audience. Then the screams continued at odd intervals throughout the duration of the performance. From the other side of the theater she could make out a man slamming his hand across the mouth of a girl at each outburst, but they remained in their seats. Someone far away shouted "SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
She whispered to me in a closet once, “We each bring something different to the table, diverse intelligences.”
She proudly confessed that she and her friends call each other idiots all the time, for fun.
She explained once that “Life requires dancing with demons because all is dangerous and volatile in direct proportion to the force of its exclusion.”