Today I recall attending the Museum of Moving Image’s First Look Film Festival last spring and watching filmmaker Ben Balcom’s experimental documentary News from Nowhere (2020). In the film, a meditation on a public park in Milwaukee, Balcom quotes Bernadette Mayer’s “Utopia” when she asks, “what’s your idea of a good time?” Increasingly I ask myself Balcom’s question, which is Mayer’s question with limited reward or answer. I have not known what my idea of a good time is for some while. For an adolescent period it was drugs and drinking. For a longer period it was restrictions of all pleasures of any kind. Now I am 35 and at a loss for words or vices except for Succession and sex. I pull quietness over me like a pelt. The quotidian a frayed, familiar comfort. From my worn couch, I watch the April light branch through the oak outside my window. On the roof of an apartment across the street, a college boy shotguns a beer, shirtless and spartan. I shut the blinds when his music begins to blast and turn my light off before ten. I lie in the dark wondering, but not writing. Perhaps I am not the wanting kind.
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